In 2013, President Obama described income inequality as posing “a fundamental threat to the American Dream.” Income inequality is on the rise in the United States, but does this also imply that there has been a decline in American individuals’ well-being?
Recent discussions of income inequality tend to equate a decrease in income inequality with an improvement in well-being, but this is not necessarily true in all circumstances. This begs the question: what is well-being, and how do we quantify it?
One common way of looking at well-being is through median household income. Below is an interactive, county-level map of median household income in 2012 colored by quintiles. Click on a county for its income level.
Quantifying well-being is by no means an unexplored topic. Two more complex examples of quantifying well-being are through health outcomes and a weighted aggregation of economic indicators.
Below, I include an example based on four variables:
Unemployment (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2012)
Poverty (from the U.S. Census Bureau 2012)
Obesity (from the Centers for Disease Control 2012)
Population that Did Not Finish High School (from the American Community Survey 2009 - 2013)
By breaking each of these variables into quantiles and thus standardizing each variable’s units, we can look at counties’ relative well-being with respect to multiple variables rather than just one.
When using multiple variables, however, another important question arises: how do we decide on weightings?
One way is to simply weight all variables equally. Below is a map of counties’ relative well-being with respect to these four variables weighting each variable equally. Counties in blue are above average and counties in red are below average. To see a county’s specific values, click on the county of interest.
Comparing this Index Map to the Median Household Income Map, there are some glaring differences in implied relative well-being. In particular, note how much worse California and Alaska appear using the Index. Also, note the stronghold of dark blue that stretches from southern Maine to Northern Virginia on the Median Household Income Map breaks apart using the Index, although the area does maintain an above average relative well-being. Finally, it is worth noting that there are areas that look the same under…(line truncated)…
It’s safe to say that many factors play a role in an individual’s overall well-being; however, there is inevitably a highly subjective component in weighting these factors to create an Index of Well-Being, regardless of which factors are included. Rather than make my own assumptions, I instead propose an interface that allows the user to decide on these weights.
I have created an interactive visualization tool that allows users to subjectively explore well-being in the United States at the county level by choosing their own weightings for these four variables. See for yourself!
Although there are only four variables for the user to choose from so far, it would be easy to add more county-level data as well as multiple years of data and incorporate it into this interface. By assembling various additional measures of quality of life such as economic, health, crime, education, psychological, and environmental components, users would be able visually explore the interactions of different components of well-being and weighting them as they see fit. \(\hspace{4ex} _\blacksquare\)